Unofficial news and tips about Google

September 15, 2007

Profiles for iGoogle's Gadget Developers

If you like an iGoogle gadget, there's a big chance that the author wrote other great gadgets. Just click on the small arrow next to the title, choose "About this gadget" and the developer's name will point you to a profile page that contains all of his/her gadgets.

iGoogle also has a "hall of fame" of the authors that wrote the most popular gadgets. There's no overall ranking, as Google shows different rankings for each international edition. Here's the #1 gadget developer for the US edition of iGoogle: Phillip Olsen, who wrote 147 gadgets.

To find if one of your Gmail contacts writes gadgets, enter his/her name in iGoogle's search box or go to the My Community page.

"The evolution of this gadget ecosystem reminds me of the early evolution of the web itself. Many of our gadget developers, like many early web developers, built gadgets primarily for fun, and the hobbyist developer community remains vital to the success of the gadgets platform. As iGoogle grew, a second motivation for gadget development arose: impact. Building a gadget has become a way to reach millions of users on a daily basis. We now see companies building gadgets for the same reasons that companies started building websites in the early days of the web - to reach new and existing customers," writes Sep Kamvar, the lead software engineer of personalization at Google. He also mentions that iGoogle is a product that tried to answer a simple question: "What do I want to see?" and show this information without entering a query. Introducing an API for creating gadgets made it easier to offer a wide range of content. "Gadgets from our top developers get tens of millions of page views per week, and our users can choose from more than 10,000 gadgets in the directory."

It's easier if you already have a popular site like YouTube, eBay or The Onion. Maybe your users won't go to your site every day, but having a gadget on their homepage keeps them updated and increases your brand's value.